Here’s a different take on the situation: I think this is bad for Twitter. Twitter has started building and shipping incredibly well, they’re getting more products out than I ever remember seeing. I was very confident in the trajectory they were going in.
For all the toxicity people complain about with Twitter, I remember the early days. They’ve made huge progress in community quality.
Most importantly, Twitter is the only social media company taking real action on the addiction and mental health impacts. You can make your Twitter a chronological timeline instead of an algorithm feed. You can pay to remove some ads. They’re not perfect, but they’ve done much more than anyone else.
Beyond all of that, I think Jack was the most trustworthy figure running social media. Not a super high bar, but he was willing to engage with the topic deeply. I think he did Rogan’s podcast twice, the second time shortly after the first because the feedback was that they didn’t engage critically enough. That’s ~6 hours of fairly open conversation, most people stick to 5 minute news segments.
Although influential, surely Twitter's recent run isn't because of Jack himself, but the new culture he instigated? Him leaving doesn't change the dynamic there now, just another person who's been influential in the process signing off on the big ticket things.
> they’re getting more products out than I ever remember seeing
None of them are products people actually want. They're killing them off as fast as they are launching them.
> You can make your Twitter a chronological timeline instead of an algorithm feed.
You always have been able to, but they have incessantly pushed you to not use it. They used to keep automatically switching you away from the chronological one every few weeks of use. They've stopped doing that but that is such a minimum effort thing I do not want to give them any credit for fixing the thing they broke on purpose.
Decentralised Twitter already exists in the form of ActivityPub. Twitter itself has been at this for two years now and have nothing whatsoever to show for it. They are not serious about it.
It keeps showing me fake notifications that in fact are recent posts from influencers that I don't follow and have no interest in doing so. Or at least it was because I stopped using it.
> my one wish for for twitter inc is to become the most transparent company in the world
I wish for that too. But their moderation has shown they don’t believe it. It is one of the most opaque and arbitrary processes you can find. If they really want to be transparent (and build a healthy platform) they need to fix that first.
Ona tangentially related matter: Interesting that Parag Agrawal is being named CEO. This makes 3 CEOs (that I know of) that are of Indian descent (other two being Microsoft's Satya Nadella and Alphabet's Sundar Pichai).
I wonder if it is just apophenia or if there is some underlying reason why in the last years we've had an increase in Indian CEOs.
I'm not a huge fan of some decisions from Jack's administration at Twitter (like killing Vine and their AR projects, or hiding of the cron feed) but I admire his discipline to manage two companies that by their own should be monumental task. Hope him the best, and hoping too twitter doesn't change for worst with this change.
> Agrawal in November 2020 interview: "Our role is not to be bound by the First Amendment... focus[ing] less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have changed."
Expect accelerating changes to the “free speech arm of the free speech party”
Best of luck to Parag - I'm guessing that investors will be measuring his success based on his ability to monetize Twitter in a way that Jack wasn't able to (not a dig at Jack, I recognize that it's an insanely hard problem to solve). For better or for worse it seems like Twitter has become a key part of our society, and I'm curious to see what ideas they come up with in the next few years
For all the toxicity people complain about with Twitter, I remember the early days. They’ve made huge progress in community quality.
Most importantly, Twitter is the only social media company taking real action on the addiction and mental health impacts. You can make your Twitter a chronological timeline instead of an algorithm feed. You can pay to remove some ads. They’re not perfect, but they’ve done much more than anyone else.
Beyond all of that, I think Jack was the most trustworthy figure running social media. Not a super high bar, but he was willing to engage with the topic deeply. I think he did Rogan’s podcast twice, the second time shortly after the first because the feedback was that they didn’t engage critically enough. That’s ~6 hours of fairly open conversation, most people stick to 5 minute news segments.